The Coyote Project

Date: January 2015 through September 2025

Services: Emerging Technologies, Spot Checks, Visual Description Practice, Working Groups, Organizational Practices

The stage of a darkend theatre full of rows of white table tops and 12 people with light to medium skin tone seated at them working on laptops, some alone, and some in groups of two. The room is dimly lit with black stage curtains and equipment on our left, and auditorium seating and wooden wall panels on our right. Cables run across the floor and the tables are full with backpacks, drinks, and keypads.

PAC partnered with MCA Chicago to create The Coyote Project, a visual description workflow and hosted platform that enabled museums and cultural organizations to author, review, approve, and publish image descriptions and alt text across their digital products.

A browser window displaying a "Resources" page for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. A top navigation bar includes tabs such as Dashboard, Assignments, Resources, Descriptions, Members, Meta, and Resource Groups, along with dropdowns for the museum and a user named Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli. On the left sidebar are search and filter options, including priority, status checkboxes like Assigned and Unassigned, and an "Assigned to User" dropdown with Search and Clear buttons. The main panel shows "TOTAL: 42," a select-all checkbox, a bulk assign dropdown, an Assign button, and view toggles. Below, individual artwork entries appear in a list with checkboxes, thumbnail images, orange "PARTIALLY COMPLETED" labels, blue tags such as "ALT" and "LONG," descriptive metadata, and action buttons labeled View, Edit, and Describe. The visible artworks include pieces by Michelangelo Pistoletto and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

A screenshot of a Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Coyote resource page. At the top is the artwork information for Kerry James Marshall's Untitled (Painter), 2009, followed by metadata and navigation menus. The main artwork image shows a Black woman painter facing the viewer, with very dark skin, voluminous coiled hair, hoop earrings, and a structured mustard-yellow, blue, and maroon jacket. She holds a thin paintbrush and a messy palette covered with bright colors. Behind her is a large paint-by-numbers-style portrait outline, partially filled with areas of green, orange, yellow, and other colors, while a dark black background occupies the left side. To the right of the artwork, the page lists resource details such as Coyote ID, priority, resource type, source URI, and dates. Below, a descriptions section shows approved short and long text entries for the artwork with authors listed and actions to edit or view the description. At the bottom of the pages are two sections to link related resources and create assignments.

Project Description

The Coyote project began in 2015 as a partnership between the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Prime Access Consulting during the development of a new MCA website. Museum websites are rich with images, but at the time, those images were often undescribed or inconsistently described. MCA and PAC set out to address that gap by creating a workflow that would support the authoring, editing, approval, and publication of visual descriptions at institutional scale.

The first version of Coyote was locally hosted and integrated with MCA’s web content management system. It presented images from the CMS that needed description, supported the creation and review of those descriptions, and sent approved descriptions back to the website for publication. Over time, Coyote evolved into a hosted platform that other cultural organizations could use to develop, edit, refine, and integrate visual descriptions across their digital products.

Coyote was sunset in 2025, but its influence remains significant. The project helped move the field forward in how museums and cultural organizations think about visual description: not as a one-off accommodation, but as a structured content practice requiring authoring standards, editorial workflows, metadata, publishing infrastructure, and organizational commitment. Today, with AI tools increasingly available, it can be easy to overlook how much of this work was built through sustained human effort. Thousands upon thousands of descriptions were written by hand by museum staff, contractors, and collaborators, and Coyote was instrumental in making that labor manageable, reviewable, and publishable.

For the organizations that used it, Coyote helped power the visual description and alt text workflows behind their public websites. It gave teams a practical way to move from good intentions to operational practice, embedding visual description into content production rather than treating it as an afterthought. PAC is proud of the role Coyote played in advancing visual description across the cultural sector and in helping establish practices that continue to shape inclusive digital interpretation today.